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Policing in London

All I can say is that the Liberal Democrats are putting out the information in my constituency. In fact, the Liberal Democrats are now being called the ““Fib Dems”” because of the amount of lies that are being cascaded around the area. They always try to feed this fear of crime unnecessarily. The safer neighbourhoods teams spend 75 per cent. of their working hours doing visible community policing, and between April 2006 and February 2007, they carried out more than 17,200 arrests. We heard the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs asking earlier whether what has been achieved is anything to be proud of. Well, let me tell him some of the things that we should be proud of. As I said, more than 380 crack houses were closed and we are proud of that. More than 750 antisocial behaviour orders were issued, and we are proud of that. We carried out 4,900 prolific persistent offender interventions, and we are also proud of that. We issued more than 3,300 penalty notices and visited more than 36,200 crime victims—and more. All that has resulted in a 6 per cent. overall drop in crime in the London area.